Scents and Sensibility

From Details Magazine, July 1992, by Brian Eno

I started thinking about smell in 1965. At art college, a friend and I made
a little collection of evocative aromas, housed in about fifty small bottles.
There was rubber, naptha, motorcycle dope, cuir de russe (used to make leather
smell like leather rather than dead animals), gasoline, ammonia, juniper wood.
In 1978, in a neglected and unlikely part of London, I discovered an old
pharmacy that was crammed with oils and absolutes.

Their beautiful names - styrax, patchouli, franipani, amber, myrrh,
geraniol, opoponax, heliotrope - and their familiar/strange aromas attracted my
curiosity, and I bought over a hundred bottles. Soon I found myself actively
collecting the primary materials of perfumery - in Madrid I found a crumbling
apothecary's with dozens of mysteriously labeled phials; in San Francisco I
discovered the strage olfactory world of Chinatown, of five spices and jasmine
and ginseng; a woman I met in Ibiza gave me a minute bottle containing just one
drop of an utterly heavenly material called nardo (I later came to think that
this was probably spikenard oil, extracted from a shrub growing at between six
and eight thousand feet on the Himalayas and used by wealthy Indian ladies as a
prelude to lovemaking).

I started mixing things together. I was fascinated by the synergies of
combinations, how two quite familiar smells carefully combined could create new
and unrecognizable sensation. Perfumery has a lot to do with this process of
courting the edges of unrecognizability, of evoking sensations that don't have
names, or of mixing up sensations that don't belong together. Some materials
are in themselves schizophrenic (or is it oxymoronic?) in that they have two
rather contradictory natures. Methyl octane carbonate, for example, evokes the
smell of violets and motorcycles; Dior's Farenheit uses a lot of it.
Orris butter, a complex derivative of the roots of iris, is vaguely floral in
small amounts but almost obscenely fleshy (like the smell beneath a breast or
between buttocks) in quantity. Civet, from the anal gland of the civet cat, is
intensely disagreeable as soon as it is recognizable, but amazingly sexy in
subliminal doses (it features in Guerlain's Jicky, probably the oldest
extant perfume, and one whose market has changed over the hundred years of its
existence - it now has a following among gay men). Courmarin, the primary
ingredient in Cacharel's Lou Lou, has the characteristic smell of late
summer, from whose flowers and grassses it is derived, but then it carries
strange overtones of powder, boudoirs, bedrooms...

You don't have to dabble for very long to begin to realize that the world of
smell has no reliable maps, no single language, no comprehensible metaphorical
structure within which we might comprehend it and navigate our way around it.
It seems to compare poorly, for example, with the world of sight. If we want to
think about color, we can use words like hue and brightess and saturation. We
can visualize a particular sightly milky green, imagine where it falls on a
spectrum chart, look at its neighbours and complemetaries, and the finally say
that it is, say, "eau de nil" or "pale turquoise" or "jade."
These are relatively precise numerically, in angstroms, for example, or (if you
want to paint your house in it) as "British Standard paintshade number
something-or-other." Similarly with shape: We use measurement and geometry
and, of course, drawings, to communicate that type of information.

But the best we seem to be able to do with smells is to evoke comparisons.
We can say that karanal is "like striking a flint," that the aldehyde
C14 is "like latex." As far as I know there is not even the beginning
of a usable system of realting these to one another. Where does karanal stand
in relation to tuberose? Or sandalwood to sage? Don't ask me.

Like others who've played with perfumes, I found this somewhat
unsatisfactory. I wanted a system, a map. I briefly thought I might be able to
make one myself, but this plan foundered as I jotted down the resemblance
between strawberries and egg yolk, between breweries and certain types of
horsehair bedding. I just knew I didn't have enough stamina to collect, let
alone collate, all those sensations. I'd also noticed to my confusion that the
substances "coriander" and "vetiver" were never quite the
same twice. The vetiver I bought in the Walworth Road in London was distinctly
different from what I got from the labs of Quest International in Paris, and the
French coriander I found in 1988 was different from the French coriander I
bought a year later. Even the names, it turned out, didn't describe anything
stable. So, still lost, I abandoned the classification project (what a relief!)
and decided to continue pleasurably stumbling around in the gloaming, rubbing
bits of thei and that on anyone kind enough to loan me a patch of their skin,
then sniffing to test the effects (it turned out to be a great way of getting to
know people...).

It took me a long time to begin to realize that this was the way things were
likely to continue. Just like with everything else, there was probably never
going to be a time when I "knew what I was doing," when I had in mind
some final, logical picture of the whole world of smell. The Linnaeus of smell
was not to be, or not to be me.

It's strange how you arrive at ideas, how thoughts consolidate themselves
out of the most disparate and unlikely beginnings, and how often those
beginnings are realizations from experience that something isn't possible (or
alternately is possible but not interesting). This is one such roundabout
story.

During my dabbling with perfumes, I'd also been dabbling with other things,
including music. Whenever I talked about sound, I stressed the inadequacy of
the classical languages that composers had used to describe it. I said that the
evolution of the electronic instruments and recording processes had created a
situation where the whole question of timbre - the physical quality of sound -
had been opened up wide and had become a major focus of compositional attention.
Modern composers and producers working in recording studios were experimenting
with sound itself and were quite content to use largely traditional "received"
forms (such as "the blues") upon which to hang their experiments. It
struck me that this had been completely missed by classically trained
musicologists, who were always looking for innovation in places where it wasn't
happening. They were expecting that any music that deserved the title "new"
would be making breakthroughs in harmony, in melody, in compositional structure;
but here they were faced with a music that, in those respects, had barely made
it past the turn of the century.

When they failed to notice, or at least attach any importance to, was that
their language, the language of classical written composition, simply didn't
have any terms to describe Jimi Hendrix's guitar sound on "Voodoo Chile"
or Phil Spector's production of "Da Doo Ron Ron" - arguably
the most interesting features of those works. Rock music, I kept saying, was a
music of timbre and texture, of the physical experience of sound, in a way that
no other music had ever been or could have ever been. It dealt with a
potentially infinite sonic pallette, a palette whose gradations and combinations
would never adequately be described, and where the attempt at description must
always lag behind the infinites of permutation.

So while I was happy to accept and exploit this wonderfully fluid situation
in music, I was worried about finding myself in the same place vis-à-vis
perfume. The inconsistency of these positions finally filtered through to me
while I was delivering a talk to a group of businessmen in Brussels. My talk
was called "The Future of Culture in Europe," and in it I tried to
sketch out the breakdown of the classical view of Culture and art history in
favor of a more contemporary one. Until quite recently, I said, Culture had
been viewed as a field of hurman behaviors and artifacts that could be organized
in some ideal way, the assumption being that, if only we sat down and talked
about it for long enough, we would all agree that, say, Dante, Shakespeare,
Beethoven, Goethe, Wagner, and a few other big names were the real kingpins of
Culture, and that, say, chocolate-box designers, popular balladeers,
walking-stick carvers, hairdressers, clothes designers, and Little Richard were
all relatively marginal. The history of the history of art is really the story
of people trying to make a claim form one orthodoxy in favor of any other,
asserting that the particular line that they drew through the field of all the
events we refer to as Culture had some special validity and the proximity to
that line was a measure of originality, profundity, longevity: in short, of
value.

For many reasons this idea of intrinsic, given value becomes less and less
tenable. We don't expect to write books now called "The History of
Painting" (as if there were only one), and only a dwindling band of
fundamentalists (about 5.9 billion at the last count) still believe in "the
True Nature" of anything. We become more and more comfortable with the
idea that there are all sorts of ways of describing and organizing phenomena,
that there are descriptive languages that don't translate into one another, that
there is no absolute basis upon which to decide between one language and the
other, and that anyway, "the same set of phenomena" is a shifting
field of energies that we choose to give the same name to until it gets so
confusing that we have to find another.

So, just as we might come to accept that "coriander" is a name for
a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we
also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom,
Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their
capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for
spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even
reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered,
unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble
together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work
out another when the situation demands.

And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders,
poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing
which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience - the possibility of
better guesses - without certainty.

Perhaps our sense of this, the sense of belonging to a world held together
by networks of ephemeral confidences (such as philosophies and stock markets)
rather than permanent certainties, predisposes us to embrace the pleasures of
our most primitive and unlangued sense. Being mystified doesn't frighten us as
much as it used to. And the point for me is not to expect perfumery to take its
place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything
else to become like perfume.